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This study aims to provide an understanding of the everyday life of older people in a Swedish urban neighbourhood, with a special focus on the experienced fear of crime and how fear may affect mobilities in later life. The paper draws upon in-depth data from an ethnographic case study conducted between December 2011 and April 2013, which followed a group of older people in the neighbourhood of Seved in the city of Malmö, Sweden. The average income in the neighbourhood is one of the lowest in the city, where unemployment is high. Seved is often negatively portrayed in the media, and the residents generally feel more insecure than those in the rest of Malmö. The senior group followed, is part of a municipal project aimed at strengthening networks and enhancing feelings of social participation for older people. Through a variety of activities, the municipality seeks to achieve social sustainability through everyday life mobility and social participation. Findings highlight that news media plays a substantial role in forming perceptions of the neighbourhood. Mental maps and imagined geographies do negatively impact the everyday mobility of persons both inside and outside the area. Some older residents display both avoidance and protective behaviour, which implies that their everyday life mobility is restricted because of their fear of crime. However, social participation and knowing people in the neighbourhood seems to have a salutary effect on their fear of crime and a commendatory effect on their everyday life mobility. The results also raises questions about stereotyping (the Other) and ageism.

The aim of this paper is to study how local governments in Sweden view the role of public transport in society, and to investigate how public transport is used in a strategic capacity. By studying general policy documents, the ambition is to gain a wider understanding of the role of public transport based on the societal context it is situated in. Documents from 15 regions and 27 municipalities have been analysed by a qualitative content analysis. Results show that public transport is regarded as an important factor towards achieving other goals and other public values, particularly those related to economic and environmental issues; and that the social dimension is not as prioritised. Rail-bound public transport is often advocated, as are collaboration between organizations and integrated land-use and transport planning. However, the studied documents showed large overall differences in how counties and municipalities address public transport issues. It should be a priority in Sweden’s main steering documents to treat public transport consistently and give it the same priority as other societal functions—not least because Sweden’s treatment of public transport is a reasonable reflection of its overall society and can influence prioritisations and considerations in counties and municipalities across the country.

Turmoil Alley/Larmgränd is an interactive exhibition that uses mixed media: paper and digital film in a mobile application that employs image recognition. The work consists of two posters with houses from Malmö, Sweden which are used as a canvas for story fragments about people who lived and worked in Malmö between 1900 and 1925. To access these fragments, the user uses her iPhone and the Argon web AR application (created by the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology with whom we have collaborated).

Empirical inventories of the role of public transport in a regional- and communal practice are rare or, as far as we know, absent. Through this report, we want to offer an overview of what role and what values policymakers in regions and municipalities ascribe public transport in Sweden and what it is expected to contribute to in the local society. The ambition is also to study this over time. The documents analyzed for this study are the main leading policy documents from regions and municipalities in Sweden. Every region and municipality in Sweden has a political government of its own which, every year, presents goals and ambitions for the region or the municipality in a general
policy document. These documents are not explicitly focused on public transport but deal with societal issues overall. The documents have been collected from 15 regions totally and from 27 municipalities. The municipalities have been chosen randomly and are divided into five groups, foremost based on size. Material has been collected from three terms and analyzed documents are foremost from year 2008, 2011 and 2015. The selected analytical method is content analysis. Public transport is in the documents analyzed mostly described from a perspective of economical
accumulation e.g. for the labor market and industrial life. It is also described as ‘environmentally correct’ and environmentally friendly and as a good alternative to the car. Accessibility is also highly valued as well as the accessibility for older people and people with functional limitations. Public transport is overall described in positive terms and some organizations describe it as vital for the existence of the region/municipality. Public transport is depicted as something worth investing in, not
least the rail bound public transport. Coordination with other actors is considered to be important, as well as the organization between different modes of transport.
Public transport is largely described as a tool to reach other ambitions in society and as a tool for attractiveness and regional development. Much focus is on the meaning of public transport for economic and ecological sustainability. There are large variations in the material in the way in which public transport is treated (both in
regions and in municipalities). Some organizations give it a large space in the documents while others only have a sentence or two, while some have nothing. This can be viewed as problematic, especially since the focus in Sweden for a long time has been to get more people into public transport. Also illustrated by the national duplication goal, where the number of trips by public transport should be doubled by the year 2020. As such, it should be a given that a function in society that by some is described as essential, is visible in this kind of document overall. And that regional- and communal
political decision makers give them the same priorities as other important functions in society. We argue that this will give reflections in local society overall and can have an influence on how priorities and considerations in society in general are made.

This paper presents an ethnographic case study that aims to understand the meaning of social participation in a neighbourhood for daily mobility in later life. In the study, the mobility of the participants of a senior-citizen project was monitored over 18 months. The project was founded as a result of a municipal district’s targeting of social sustainability. The results show that social participation had positive effects on the daily mobility of the participants. The implementation of broad-minded thinking from the municipality and the cooperation of various municipal actors were shown to be essential for the positive outcome of this project.